


Looking Forwards

by Olive343



Category: Worm (Web Serial Novel)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Death, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-23
Updated: 2014-08-23
Packaged: 2018-02-21 03:57:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2453846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Olive343/pseuds/Olive343
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One who could look backwards perfectly and another who could only see forwards and trying to meet in the middle of everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Looking Forwards

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theslowblitz](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=theslowblitz).



Contessa was fourteen years old when she met Rebecca. The other girl was washed out, her skin sallow and hanging off of her bones in a way that reminded her painfully of when someone in the village was sick with the consumption. The Doctor has a look at her charts and doesn’t quite manage to suppress her wince at whatever she sees there.  
  
Rebecca wasn’t crying, though her red eyes and the way she rubbed at them make it seem as though she would like to be. When they make her the offer, tell her about the risks, the tears dry up and the steel that shows through her cloudy eyes is enough to convince Contessa that she is right for this.   
  
Later - much, much later - she wonders: If she had known where they would take this girl would she have made this decision again?  
  
 _Of course._  
  


* * *

  
When Contessa is fifteen she finds John, introduces him to the Doctor, and watches as he is snapped up by the Doctor once the thrust of his powers come into the light. Contessa observes silently as he goes over a copy of their procedure for harvesting the formula, his pen flying over the papers, annotating his own notes straight into the material and putting in wholesale alterations in other areas. This is to be his trial, to see if he can be trusted, and if he can produce results.  
  
Contessa suspects that he will. He is fascinated.  
  
The next batch they complete using his alternate method. Out of twenty candidates, there are fourteen survivors. More than double the success rate of their own attempts. She can imagine the Doctor grinding her teeth over the fact that they have already created potent parahumans but were forced to take too much from the source to repeat those exact results.  
  
The Doctor won’t say it, but she thinks Contessa should have known. There will not be another Legend or Eidolon or Hero. There will never be a second Alexandria.  
  


* * *

  
When Contessa is sixteen, Rebecca is eighteen but doesn’t look a day older, despite two years having passed. Her bearing is regal, no trace of the pain that was writ large across it when they first met, and the hesitance - the expectation of pain that followed her around even after gaining her powers - is gone without a trace. There’s a surety in her movements, a  _presence_ that fills the rooms she enters.  
  
It’s breathtaking to behold - like the way her grandfather was able to fill a room with his energy except so much more so.  
  


* * *

  
When Contessa is eighteen, she helps Rebecca tailor her costume to present an older figure. She is now the taller of the two, despite still being two years younger, and is proposing ideas to make up in other ways what Rebecca cannot show physically. Countless subtle alterations to the angles of her visor and the cut of her shirt, along with loosening the way the cape hung around her neck created the illusion of greater height where none actually existed.  
  
“Perhaps a longer skirt?” she suggests. She’s seen, or at least inferred, that people tend to associate shorter skirts with school age children. It stood to reason then, that a longer one would serve to mature the image of Alexandria to the public.  
  
“What do you think of going without one?”  
  
The question is said so casually that it honestly takes Contessa a moment to parse it. After that, her cheeks make a spectacular display of darkening and she has to put down the pencil she’s using to propose design changes lest she make an absolute fool of herself.  
  
“Th- that… that might be a bit much don’t you think?” she asks reasonably, even as the thought of it sends her mind spinning out of control on tangents she can think about later.  
  
“Mm, maybe not in public, I suppose,” she says, and Contessa is very grateful that she conceded the point. Though when she glances over at the ‘younger’ girl, the expression on her face is unfamiliar - a small smile and a glimmer of hesitant excitement in the lines of her posture. Her brown eyes seemed to glimmer behind her hair, down and around her face.  
  
“‘Not in public’?” she teased, following the conversation's flow, “Do you have some other occasion in mind for it then?”  
  
“Well,” she said slowly, drawing the words out as if over coals, “I was thinking…”  
  
“You don’t have to tell me,” Contessa says. She has this feeling that something is just over the horizon and yet she can’t see it. She doesn’t even know the form it will take and it’s maddening. “Not if it makes you uncomfortable.” Left unsaid went that she could find out what it was that was on Rebecca’s mind almost trivially. Left unsaid went that she wanted  _badly_  to know.  
  
“No!” she exclaimed, her cheeks colouring a surprising amount. “No, it’s… well… Shit. I mean…” She took a deep breath, “ _Wouldyouliketogooutwithme?!”_  
  
Contessa was pretty sure that both of them were blushing at this point, and that she probably could have given a reasonable impression of a heat lamp if the feeling across her face was any indication.  
  
Dozens of moments spring to mind, meetings where she spent time subtly glancing at the heroic person on the bed before her. The drift of her hair across her shoulders, the sweep of her arms across the expanse of her chest, the arch of her nose - everything about her.  
  
She pushes her chair back, very carefully standing straight. She’s taller than Rebecca, especially when the other girl sits, and the tempered anticipation of her answer - of  _her -_  in Rebecca’s eyes is at odds with the youngness of her body. It’s fascinating for it’s uniqueness.   
  
There’s a thousand reasons that she shouldn’t do this, and a thousand more things that she already hasn’t the time for. But-  
  
There’s always so many reasons not to do anything. But-  
  
 _The smile on her lips. The joy in every aspect of her body as she swooped and dived through the air without a care in the world._  
  
Finding a reason to go out and  _do_ was almost infinitely harder, even if it later seems that it was sitting in front of you the entire time.  
  
She wants this but even so, or perhaps even because of that, she shouldn’t. But-  
  
Contessa leans down and kisses the girl in front of her.  
  


* * *

  
The smell of ash hangs over the room like a pall and large flakes of it sit in their hair, caught in her own when they sat up against one another. Contessa failed to predict the monster and the Triumvirate were unable to stop it before it escaped and left behind a column of smoke that Eidolon was still working to clear, three days after the fact.   
  
The Number Man estimated that the change in oil value would cause chaos amongst the oil barons in the region, not to mention knock-on effects around the world.  
  
Alexandria's costume had been reduced to a scavenged shirt and pants, both turned grey by the ash where they hadn't been burned black by the heat. Her visor was, miraculously, still on - though it looked like it had flowed at some point because it was cracked where it had been moulded onto her face by the heat.  
  
The monster, the Behemoth, crippled or killed over 70% of the capes that fought it.  
  
When Alexandria scrapes her hands across her face the visor, already brittle, practically powders in her hands. Her eyes, always so strong, are red and they have the beginnings of bags beneath them. It's not much, but Contessa knows her well enough to see the exhaustion for what it is - her hands shaking, head drooping, her cheeks gone pale.  
  
They hadn’t managed to kill it. It had returned to the earth, but it was still alive. What would they have to lose to fight it back the next time, and the time after that?  
  
Instead of speaking they just sit on the bed together and Rebecca’s breathing is so shallow that Contessa almost doesn’t notice that she’s fallen asleep until her head comes to rest on her shoulder, the tension that held their bodies up simply evaporating away to nothing.  
  
It seemed as though it could be the beginning of something, this thing they’ve reached, or a middle, but at the same time it feels more than anything like an ending.  
  


* * *

  
The room is uncomfortably quiet when she comes to visit and the chirping of monitors doesn’t do enough to dispel the silence in the room. There’s only one patient in the room, though it’s no one they ever really expected to need to be in one again.   
  
Contessa has been running the situation through her head, trying to come up with a way to fix this situation, but the Doctor thinks that this could be for the best, pushing more people into the Protectorate.   
  
The thought is appalling, sickening to even conceive of but, then, what’s one more shame to pile on the rest? She stops thinking about it. There will be time later on for that.  
  
There’s the remains of a metal tray lying on the floor beside the bed, the top of it completely shattered under someone’s hand. Said someone sits in the bed, staring out the closed window.   
  
She’s not sure what to say, what she  _can_ say, in the wake of Manton’s breakdown. “Hey.”  
  
Rebecca turned to face her and the look on her face brightens a little, even if it remains closed. Bandages affix a gauze pad over the ruined socket that the Siberian left of her eye and there are more strips wrapping around her face to cover the scar across her cheek and forehead. But there’s the hint of a smile there and Contessa, for just a moment, wants to cry.  
  
Despite Rebecca turning thirty this year, despite being the invincible hero Alexandria, Contessa can’t help but think of how small she looks in the large hospital bed.  
  
It’s like they’re meeting for the first time again and it breaks her heart. “Hey.”  
  
It’s terribly awkward. “Do you-”  
  
“Did you know about Manton?”  _Did you know? Did you let this happen?_  
  
There’s a startling coldness in the interjection, and something in her chest tightens at the implication. “No,” she manages, “not until after he’d taken a second vial for himself.” She looks at Rebecca’s hands above the sheet rather than at her face. One of them was twisting something over her palm and the other was clenched tight. “I went and saw his daughter - what was left of her - at least, ” she says, “and I... I think I can understand why he had his break.”  
  
It’s a vast understatement to call it a break, and much too clinical. It was nothing less than a parent’s furious grief taking from them all reason and that was without acknowledging that for someone who they had called ‘friend’ it was horrifyingly impersonal. A necessary detachment, for him and for themselves.  
  
To see something you love become something so twisted and yet still the same - there must be nothing worse.  
  
What would her  _parents_  think, if they could see the thing their daughter had become? She stops thinking about it. If she’s still alive by the time all is said and done, then maybe she can consider it.  
  
Rebecca doesn’t say anything, and Contessa doesn’t know what to say. She goes to take a seat at the bedside and Rebecca doesn’t stop her. The clicking of her shoes seems boorish, intrusive in the oppressive atmosphere, and she’s grateful when she can sit and let the silence fall over the two of them again.  
  
From her bag, she produces a vase with a single flower in it. It’s big and purple and this Earth doesn’t have a name for it. It’s just something she liked the look of and it seems to brighten the room a little. Rebecca doesn’t look at it at first, but after a while Contessa sees her turning her head to see it in her good eye and Contessa’s heart aches again, despite the other girl’s slight smile.  
  
“What are you going to do about that for the public?” she asks, vaguely gesturing towards her own face for clarification, although she doubts that it’s required. What else even is there to talk about in the wake of Manton’s defection?  
  
“I’ve got a glass eye for now,” she says, holding it out for Contessa to see, “and I can take a leave of absence from the PRT until He- until a more convincing replacement can be made.” She doesn’t acknowledge the slip and Contessa doesn’t question her on it, nor does she react beyond offering her hand up against the bedrail.  
  
She’s not sure whether or not she’s surprised that Rebecca twines their fingers together, so she just decides to be happy, even for just a little while.  
  


* * *

  
A lot of things happen when Contessa is forty one. Her hair turns predominantly grey. The world ends. Alexandria finally dies. The world is saved.  
  
It would be very easy, she thinks, to revolve around this girl: to hate this girl, or despise her or fawn over her or completely destroy her. She could do all of these things and the girl wouldn’t be able to stop her, not at her best and certainly not now, when she was barely able to speak.  
  
Something that might be speech comes out of the girl’s mouth, and other sounds leave her own.  
  
What sounds she was making… what words the girl was hearing… what the girl was trying to say back to her… Contessa didn’t understand it at all. They were just things her power was feeding her and, as she had done for almost two years, she walked the path without thinking. Without  _feeling._  
  
What they had had - if it had been anything at all, by the end - was something she couldn’t bear to remember. And so she didn’t.  
  
There was much less purpose now, though, and much more time to think. Time to grieve.  
  
This girl in front of her was something at the unhappy center of it all, and despite how much hate she can feel bubbling up to meet her, when she puts two bullets in the back of her head it’s almost an anticlimax. It seems much too simple for someone who had destroyed god.  
  
Contessa steps forward, to examine the body and finds, much to her surprise, that it’s still breathing. Still  _alive._ But without her powers, as evidenced by Contessa having control of her body and of the heavy revolver sitting in her hand. She aims it at the girl’s head again.  
  
But then she considers - it would be much, much crueler to leave her alive, to leave her without the things she had built her life around. Her friends. Her identity.   
  
Her lover.  
  
Yes, much crueler to let her live.  
  
It’s petty and vindictive and it reminds Contessa of a hot burning rage that sits low in her gut and a grief that she could drown her lungs in, but she holsters the gun and hoists the girl over her shoulder, uncaring of the trail of blood she leaves in her wake.


End file.
